A Fistful of Lightning
by Vanful of Kids
Summary: All the Little Sisters leave for college, and Jack Ryan finds himself in an empty home with endless lamentations. Jack flounders as he seeks purpose, before a chance encounter with a dangerous woman with a cobalt syringe propels him back into a world of violence where nothing is as it truly seems.
1. LEAVING THE NEST

Chapter 1: LEAVING THE NEST

The day Mascha left for University was the most relieved Jack Ryan had felt in over a decade.

It had begun innocuously enough. Mascha had predictably lagged on packing up all of her things, and the onus fell upon Jack to help her find her teddy bear.

"Times like this I wish Sarah or Caroline were still around," Jack grunted, sifting through a collapsed heap of comic books splayed out at the foot of Mascha's bed. "They kept you responsible. Never known a lady to be such a slob."

"I feel like you're insulting me."

"I'm just telling it how it is," Jack said. He pushed aside a stack of Batman trades to reveal a patch of carpet inundated with a rainbow of solidified molten candy. A cavalcade of bent and browning lollipop sticks rose from the disgusting mass like an assembly of tombstones. "Mascha, what the hell?"

She eyed the cause of his concern quizzically. "There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Oh, and language, Dad." She wagged her finger at Jack for emphasis.

"Mascha…what the hell?"

And so it went. Jack liked the banality of parenthood. It was comfortable and easy, and when Mascha disappeared down the street in the shitty old Toyota he had bought for her the week prior, he couldn't help but think,

She's gonna drive that thing straight through the wall of an Arby's.

Then, of course,

Yeah. I did okay.

The moment passed, the surge of pride gone as quickly as it had come, and he found himself sitting on the porch of his modest two-story suburban palace, sucking down the smoke of an imported cigarette and gazing up at the setting sun.

Whatever elation the day had brought him had dissipated entirely with the setting of the sun. Storm clouds moved in under cover of darkness, smothering the starlight. The first drop of rain fell upon the tip of his nose, and the next two right in the center of his left eye, eliciting an emphatic "Fuck…Fucking shit!" when he dropped his cigarette between the steps of the porch.

A van pulled up in front of his house. Jack stared at it quizzically, dismissing its presence as that of some wayward idiot lost in the labyrinthine mystery of an American suburb, until five minutes had passed and he realized that the driver intended to idle there for an indefinite period of time.

"I should call the police," Jack muttered.

Instead he descended the porch and picked up a large rock at the base of the tree dominating his front yard. With the grace and majesty of a powerful tiger, he walked up to the idling van and rapped his knuckles against the passenger side window, large rock hidden behind his back.

He waited.

He tried again.

That was the limit of Jack Ryan's patience.

"Roll down the fucking window!" he growled, pounding on the tinted glass.

The window rolled down excruciatingly slowly, the automatic mechanism failing a quarter into the process. Jack could see the slightest sliver of dirty blonde hair. The mysterious head jerked up suddenly, revealing a set of striking green eyes. The long eyelashes and delicate eyebrows led him to believe it was a woman, but then Jack had also known Sander Cohen.

"I can't. It's stuck," said the mysterious person with a vague Eastern European lilt. Yes, Jack thought. Definitely a lady.

"Push down the window," drawled a man with astoundingly clear diction.

"I am a weak woman with the proportionate strength of a disabled infant," sniffed the woman. "Jack Ryan, be a darling and do it for me."

Jack was inclined at that point not to listen, thinking it prudent not to leave his fingertips at the mercy of the unusual pair, and was about to vocalize his thoughts before the man chuckled.

"Jack Ryan, _would you kindly _drop that rock and push down the window?"

The compulsion struck him like a rocketized train. Nobody fucking uses that phrase, Jack thought. He wasn't the sharpest of crayons, being rather like the red crayon that everybody used and abused like a skilled whore in elementary school, and it took him a minute before he realized that probably the man used the phrase deliberately, and probably there was some risky business about to go down.

Jack dropped the rock and gripped the edge of the glass with a trembling hand. He forced it down into the rubber window trim and narrowed his eyes when he finally took a long, hard look at the denizens of the van.

The man behind the wheel was conventionally handsome, with a cleft chin, a fine head of hoary hair, and baby blue eyes that made Jack want to trust him. He wore a simple white shirt and faded blue jeans. He resembled what Jack had imagined Atlas to look like, once upon a time in his brain.

The woman was beefy, a massive rhinoceros of a bird wrapped in a leopard print hooker jacket, with massive arms that were surely capable of crushing Jack's trachea with minimal effort. There was a half-finished power bar gripped in the woman's mighty right hand. She made Jack distinctly uncomfortable. He had never liked lady bodybuilders, partially because he considered them hideous, unthinkable people, and partially because they made him feel like less of a man.

The man coughed. "Jack, would you kindly get into the back, refrain from assaulting us, and sit quietly while we explain the situation to you?"

Jack complied, but made a point of not buckling his seat belt.

The van took off, burning rubber as the fiery v8 engine combusted at a massive rate, sending power to the ground beneath the wheels.

The woman nodded.

"We know full well you are capable of overcoming your _W-Y-K_ conditioning should you have reasonable motivation to resist. But that's okay. We are going to kill all of your children if you do not comply with our demands."

Jack blinked. "Excuse me?"

The burly woman explained how they had moles inserted into the teaching staff of the universities that his daughters were attending, and Jack felt his blood both boil and chill as he realized the implications.

This organization was powerful, Jack thought.

"What do you want from me?"

Jack couldn't fathom what they wanted from him. He had spent the last fifteen years accomplishing little more than burglarizing enough homes to keep his children clothed and fed, and pounding cold ones every Friday.

The repulsive woman noticeably erected in her seat, twisting her head to regard Jack with solemnity. "Our organization wishes to enact change in this world on a global scale. Until this point, we have not had the means to do so. Tell me, are you familiar with the International Order of the Pawns?"

Jack, with the insight of a magician, saw through the pitiable attempt at misdirection. "Can we go back to the thing about murdering my kids?"

"Ah yes," said the man. He jerks his head at the car phone installed in the dashboard. "I don't think there's too much to explain about that. I make a quick call, and that precious family you've spent your life cultivating is gone. Poof. Kablammo. Done and done."

Jack wanted to kill these fuckers, but he remained a cool customer and affected an aloof air.

"We've been investigating Rapture for quite some years. Andrew Ryan's plan was not particularly subtle since a core component of it was vanishing everyone good at their job around the globe. It boggles my mind to think of just how many years he's set back the progress of mankind as a whole."

Jack narrowed his eyes. "So what does any of this have to do with me?"

The man sighed. "You know, I don't like your belligerency. We aren't bad people, Jack. I know what you need."

The van parked in front of a dive bar. The unlikely trio exited the vehicle while the rain pounded a funky beat upon the surface of their hair. The titanic woman held the door open for Jack, wanting desperately for him to accept her as an actual person, but it was a fool's errand. Having been dehumanized all throughout childhood and most of her professional adult life, she was familiar with Jack's vibe. They sat down at the bar and the man hailed the bartender.

"Johnathan, can you pour a fine brew for my friend here?"

The bartender said yes, and Jack was clearly aware that the bartender was eyeing him like he was the prize puppy at a dog swapping convention, because the bartender was a homosexual.

"Yes," stage whispered the bartender huskily. He set about pouring about Jack a fine, heady brew, a deep brown nectar promising tantalizing hazelnut flavor with subtle caramel tones. Yes, thought Jack as he imbibed the beer, perhaps this makes this situation acceptable.

"Jack, do you have sympathy for Native Americans? Those wonderful indigenous people whose land we unjustly took when we slaughtered them on the battlefield?"

"Yes," said Jack.

The man's lips thinned into a grim line. "We've been hearing rumblings that the President is about to enact some domestic policies that will vastly reduce the quality of life of everyone on the reservations. We need to assassinate the President in broad daylight in order to divert attention away from the Native Americans and get this country rolling on the right path, and you're just the man for the job."

Jack shook his head. "I'm just a man. That's impossible."

The man and disgusting woman shared a sly look.

"I believe your family has a history of choosing the impossible."

The man pulled out a glowing blue ampoule and jammed it into Jack's wrist, sending a mean force of pleasurable euphoria spreading through his veins. Jack could only compare it to chasing the dragon after a long night unloading trucks at the 7/11. A bolt of striking lightning burst forth from the charismatic fist of Jack's arm, singeing the fine oak counter of the bar. The bartender told himself not to freak out, praying that someone was getting the police, because he didn't want to.

In a burst of pain, Jack's hand was pitted with a hodgepodge of yonic crevasses, from which erupted a wicked swarm of bees that screamed into the stratosphere of the bar, harassing the patrons with promises of venomous strings. The terror that the patrons had been harboring in their breasts blossomed into full blown panic much like breast cancer starts from tiny genetic irregularities, and the rohypnol that the men had been saving for the women instead found homes in the manly gullets of the amorous gentlemen.

Jack gripped his beer tightly.

He suddenly remembered.

It was Friday.

He threw back his head and proceeded to pound the cold one, veins sparking red and blue lightning.

The man and the feminine ogre could not even begin to fathom what unfathomable events they had just set into motion. Would they regret it? They don't know. Much like most people, they lived for witnessing radical business, but what mankind at large considered radical and what Jack Ryan considered radical were as far apart as a tiger and her verbally abusive mother.

"Are you okay?" asked the unfortunate female birth.

"Dandy," growled Jack.


	2. THE RAGE OF POSEIDON

Chapter 2: THE RAGE OF POSEIDON

After murdering all the witnesses and setting fire to the bar, the terrible trio of Jack Ryan, the disgusting she-whale, and the man returned to the van and sped off into the night. Excitement crackled tangibly in the air.

Jack Ryan knew this feeling. There was a hot steaming plate of adventure sizzling in the skillet that was life. And he was a hungry man.

"How do we begin going about killing the President?" Jack asked with true curiosity.

The man glanced over his shoulder, ostensibly to look at Jack, but really to watch out for cops. "That depends Jack. Are you familiar with the plasmid Teleport?"

Jack indeed remembered those wretched wizards and their eminently practical power of teleportation. "Yeah, but I never took it."

"Then we'll need to return to Rapture to get it. You wouldn't be able to escape the Secret Service after the assassination without it, and besides that we need to stock up on EVE. We weren't able to get much out of Rapture. A few velvet-lined cases of hypos on one of Fontaine's derelict fishing subs, that's it."

The man observed the way that Jack Ryan stiffened up, and let out a tired sigh. He mustered a vaguely maternal, comforting air that his horrid partner would never evoke in her entire life, and spoke to reassure our hero.

"I know you probably have some reservations about returning to Rapture. I understand, because I grew up on a battlefield as well, and I—"

But the Big Dog, our hero Jacky R., processed the sounds spewing from the man's mouth as a sort of incoherent siren, for within him brewed an anticipation threatening to erupt in an ejaculation shockwave. Rapture had been the greatest experience of his entire life. It was like attending a sweet cocaine carnival.

Nothing else could be so wonderful.

"I'm ready," Jack hissed out through clenched teeth. It took all the will the godlike mortal possessed to suppress the various expressions of joy he wished to subject his fellow vehicle riders to.

The man, for his part, observed Jack in the rearview mirror with an awestruck expression, gobsmacked at the apparent fortitude and courage of the man riding in the backseat of his van. The lad's made of some tough stuff, he thought. Bulbous Auntie Anne in the passenger's seat tried her best to contort her body into an alluring posture, feeling a sudden surge of sexual desire for our hero, not realizing the impossibility of such a task, nor the comedy that was her wants and needs.

"Really?" asked the man incredulously.

"Yeah. I never found one last time, but I figure there must be some lying around Fort Frolic or something. Lots of those teleporting Splicers there."

The van roared deep into the night and well into the morning as the three-king trifecta made their way across a slice of mom's best Americana. The starry night gave way to a sleepy sunrise as cornstalks swayed in the wind along a peaceful rural road. Many an hour was spent chatting on agreeable topics, bonding over heartwarming anecdotes, and sharing a feast of power bars, much to the tubby gorgon's displeasure.

Finally they arrived at the ocean, where a man in a trench coat was waiting for them with a boat, a beautifully powerful watercraft worthy of their momentous journey. He gazed at Jack, but flinched upon meeting his eyes. They emanated an eerie red glow, silent promises of righteous vengeance and retribution roiling in their unfathomable depths. This man is power, the boatman thought.

Nonetheless, the boatman attempted to project dignified bravado. He ensured that his spine was upright but it took all that he had to keep from nervously blowing big chunks in front of our Jacky R. "Well shiver me timbers, Glass Rook and the Black Horse bagged themselves a Red Queen, eh?"

Nobody knew what the fuck he was talking about.

"Bring me to the fucking lighthouse," Jack snarled. He was an antsy mythical beast, perhaps a Cerberus, and the dallying stranger before him threatened to ignite the powder keg that was the Big Dog's barely restrained natural violence.

The newly minted fantastic four piled into the boat and took a hearty sniffity sniff of the salty nautical air. The boatman unfurled the sails, and the wind began to carry them to their nebulous destination. They indulged in the soothing sound of the waves lapping at the sturdy hull of their magnificent seaworthy vessel, lulling even the furious Jack into a dreamy trance, until he remembered that the lighthouse was halfway between the United States and Europe, and potentially, he would have to spend several weeks with present company.

Jiminy Crickets, thought Jack. Good thing I packed some Steel Reserve.

After 47 days on the open sea, most of it spent pounding the Big Steel and having a laugh at the landwhale's expense, Jack could finally see the familiar rapturous spire that was Andrew Ryan's devilishly inconspicuous lighthouse. He whistled in undisguised appreciation for his dad's ingenuity.

Suddenly, from the unthinkable depths of the sea, what sounded like a vastly oversized porpoise or a forcefully inducted whale on rocketfuel rumbled deep a song of power. It rocked their magnificent vessel on a tumultuous wave, sending the three worst individuals on the boat scrambling for cover.

Not Jacky R. though. Our Big Dog overtook the portside mast, standing atop it like the symbol of status that is a Mercedes Benz hood ornament. He splayed his arms out to the side in a bombastic display of challenge and power to this most ignominious aberration of the natural order.

"I fear not Poseidon and I fear not you!" screamed Jack in a voice that made Angels lock their doors at night for fear of a possible rape or burglary. "Come topside, that I may render judgment!"

His warbling fury was dulcet…and deplorable. It said nothing and everything. As though cowed by his natural authority as the king of the jungle, the denizen of the deep shot up from the sea like a professional swimmer with gold medals.

Jack's hands pulsed with invisible power, ready to take this anomaly and toss it into the sun if need be—but when the spray settles, the sight defies his expectations.

A majestically powerful young woman stood atop a submarine, a young woman who reminded him of his own daughters were they not such fuckups and disappointments. Her shining black eyes, like burning coals on a BBQ grill, radiated authority. For the first time ever Jack felt that there was someone present who could relate to his lot in life. This young woman was clearly a powerful beast.

"Who are you, strong lady?" asked Jack with a kindly tone.

But the young lady didn't hear him. She was busy jamming an arm needle into one of those Powerful Papas that Jacky R. had had many a fisticuffs session with down in the glass halls of Rapture. That was another thing they had in common, Jack thought as she seemingly murdered the Papa. He cracked open another can of Steel and waited to be acknowledged by this newfound rival.


	3. THE RAVEN-HAIRED BEAUTY

Chapter 3: THE RAVEN-HAIRED BEAUTY

Jack Ryan watched patiently as the young woman took many moments to grieve over the fallen Papa, something that he, in all his infinite wisdom, was incapable of understanding. Indeed, my friend, sometimes men posit that gods, being so distant from humanity, are incapable of understanding the intricate but ultimately insignificant pain of the mortal man. And here, Jacky R., the strongest manifestation of divine power walking contemporary Earth, verifies such lofty speculation.

For what reason does she have to cry over such a fallen titan, contemplated Jack. Has she not obtained victory over her foe? Does she not wish to luxuriate in her bubbling Jacuzzi of power?

Jack cracked open another can of gas station ambrosia to clear his mind of distress.

Finally, the young woman raised her head. She was indeed quite a sight, Jack thought, being slight of build with rather greasy raven hair. Her incandescent eyes betrayed the influence of ADAM, a lot of it.

Beautiful. Powerful. And disgusting all at once.

Just like me, thought our Big Dog.

Jack ordered the boatman to bring them alongside the submarine, and he stepped confidently and regally onto the vessel to greet this curious creature. She regarded him carefully, the way one would regard a tiger running rampant in an airport.

He nodded, and tossed her a can of powerful brew. She accepted it gratefully, taking a hearty swallow, and the two achieved a silent understanding.

"My name is Eleanor Lamb," she told Jack telepathically.

Jack engaged his strong brain and thought with urgency, "Eleanor, these four disgusting fuckers are holding my children hostage to coerce me into killing the President."

Eleanor, having just undergone a traumatic experience involving family, was sympathetic. "How can I help?" she offered graciously.

First they told each other of the family pains that they had both endured, of the horrid treatment of their Father/Mother figures respectively. Jack told Eleanor that his dad was a stupid fucker, biting his lip to hold back the waterworks, and Eleanor, being younger and less capable of controlling her emotions, related to Jack her delusion that her mother is a very nice woman, and just misguided. Jack, as if guided by divine intervention, did not correct her bullshit.

He tried to casually mention that he was a genetic abomination artifically cultivated in a lab by a slightly autistic german scientist and a sociopathic chinese genius, but he could not keep the moist warble out of his voice.

Me too, cried Eleanor, me too. It was too much for Jack, seeing himself in the teenage girl before him, the other side of his cosmic coin, the only person who would ever understand him in the universe, and he created gigantic tears. They carried on for minutes, possibly years, their wails so loud and affecting that an African Shaman caught the aural assault upon the wind, which drove him to spearhead massive cultural reform within his tribe, declaring that the path to heavan lay in the open expression of emotions, resulting in the creation of the most progressive civilization in history, that would sadly never be acknowledged with a wikipedia page.

After the tears ceased flowing and the pain dulled to a pleasurable ache, the Big Dog proceeded to relate to her a series of well-defined checkpoints and goals that would lead to the freedom of his daughters and his subsequent freedom to retaliate against the mysterious organization oppressing him. She hmmed and hemmed and nodded at all the right times, and Jack, impressed by her attentiveness, found himself wishing that this wonderful girl was his daughter instead of the insipid fucks he was putting through college.

"Basically," he told her, "you're going to need to kill the teaching staff of those three universities in order to ensure their safety."

Graceful, gracious Eleanor nodded. She was totally game.

"Thank you," said Jack. It was the first time he had ever said those words as a package deal.

She thanked him likewise for the drink then engaged her teleportation power, disappearing with the submarine to parts unknown.

As the fearless foursome entered the lighthouse, the man turned upon our hero.

"Jack," he said with much trepidation. "What's wrong? You seem troubled."

The breadth of Jack's pain could not be fully understood by the insignificant man. Jack answered, "I am hungry," and the topic was swiftly dropped.

It was a dark storm swirling in Jack's soul. A dark chapter in his significant life. He resolved to begin attending group therapy upon returning topside. Surely, he would be the best at it. The champion. As he was in all activities he participated in.

The quivering mass of a lady mistook the gravitas Jack was radiating like an intense lantern for human pain and loneliness, and the lacking cognitive ability of her, frankly, retarded brain told her, "He needs you. He needs comfort. From you." There was drama brewing amongst our insular team of unlikely heroes.

As he gazed upon the giant golden statue of his Dad's face, Jack felt the worries and tensions and disorders of the surface world leave him like a scorned lover. Yes, he thought. This is where I belong. This is who I am.

The boatman, an insecure individual who did not have the stomach to appreciate a somber atmosphere, tried to draw his quietly maudlin companions into shallow, lively conversation. Jack, enraged by the man's casual presumptuousness, and looking for an excuse to hurt someone, engaged his powers of telekinesis and wordlessly fastballed the man's hoary head down the stairs. It was a tactile reminder to the boatman that Jack was in no mood to quibble.

Imagine a scene of ghostly underwater fog, a gentle hurricane of dust and suspended water particles suffusing a hollow phalanx lined with the expressions of a man's ego in the form of festive oversized arcade tokens. Imagine four heroes overtaking the stairs of this phallic space into the bowels of a chamber, where a motorized ball waits to be filled with their bodies. Imagine the unthinkable internal strife experienced by a warrior far superior to you, indulged by the Gods Above like a favorite son.

Dad, Jack thought. You were never there for any of my birthday parties, or football games, or trips to the mall or marriages. But I forgive you.

The existence of this majestic playground of great men was worth the sacrifice of Jack's happiness. He put one foot into the bathysphere, butterflies aflutter in his well-formed belly, and wondered quietly to himself if he'd ever leave again.


	4. MAGICAL MELODIES AFOOT

CHAPTER FOUR: MAGICAL MELODIES AFOOT

Our heroes scooted off into the beauteous underwater metropolis of Rapture. Lo! So many sights and wonders, so many diversions and obscurities! While the newcomers gazed at such establishments as "Planned Parenthood by Fontaine Futuristics" and "Sinclair's Good Liquor," Jack was sitting in quiet contemplation. Since entering the bathysphere he had already pounded four cold ones, and was torn between feelings of ennui and childlike excitement.

"Look!" screamed the boatman. "It's Nini Lyon's Doll Babies!" The Big Dog shot him a glare that could topple major architectural wonders, and the boatman quickly shut his pie hole.

The bathysphere docked and Jack quickly overtook the welcoming bay for the big room with the stairs. He engaged his quadriceps and made a massive leap to the second floor. He made a beeline for the ADAM machine he had obtained a heaping helping of Electro Bolt in his previous romp, and was furious to find it thoroughly looted.

"Fuck!"

His cadre of tagalongs caught up with him. The deformed woman gazed longingly at the broken machine, lamenting its emptiness. She had been hoping to achieve self-worth through genetic modification. Jack, who sensed her disappointment, feigned the affection one would conjure in front of the hated dog of a distant relation at a family gathering. "It's okay, I shot up like fifty of these last time I was here, there is surely more to score."

A horrible laugh, like that of a hyena, split the relative silence. From out of the shadows emerged a big, beefy man, reminscent of the incredible hulk, but with a party mask on. Jack got his blood up at the sight of this unfamiliar opponent, and he ran through his options. His hands cycled through eruptions of bees, ice, fire, and barnacles, but Big Bertha beat him to it.

She ripped a pistol out from between the unfortunately corporeal mass of her gelatinous, shivering thighs. Wanting to impress the Big Dog, she summoned up some bravery.

"Freeze!" she rasped in a grating contralto register. "Hands where I can see them!"

Her rich, dulcet tones left the beast confused and conflicted, and that moment of hesitation was all the justification Jack needed to unleash the sweet release of Satan's asshole.

Now imagine power my friends, power in the form of a song, a masterclass composition, that is the crackle of flames with a howling gurgle counterpoint. Jack thought the immolation was quick and painless, but clearly, having never gone to school, he did not understand the meaning of the word "immolation." Although quite an egregious shortcoming, I believe most individuals would agree that our hero has more virtues than most saints, and should in fact be commended for this character flaw. It brought him closer to the humanity he so tragically lacked.

After the splicers's nerve endings were frayed, the flesh charred, the blood boiled, the Big Dog began to riff through his pockets for some good eats. Rapture was hungry business. He was a ravenous beast my friends, more so than usual, and sought a hot dog to quell the lamentations of his tummy. His compatriots, the trembling trio, could only gape in shock and awe. They hadn't been prepared for the horror that is Rapture. But for our hero, the city is just an arena. A gladitorial coliseum crafted by Jack's father specifically to demonstrate his capabilities. At least, that is what Jack told himself so he did not feel sad at night. All of these shenanigans and this monkeying around were, for Jack Ryan, just an extreme sport like lacrosse or toboganning, except slightly more dangerous.

"What are you looking for?" asked the whomping 'woman.' She was clearly ignorant of how things went down in the city, so Jack informed her around a mouthful of found cupcake. "Food, you fat fuck." Satisfied with his explanation, her repulsive brain nonetheless bitched to itself "So...where is MY food?" Being just barely on the preferable side of the line between being braindead or struggling to achieve a 900 on the SAT, the trollish trollop refrained from bellyaching to the Big Dog. That would have indeed been a mistake, the unfixable kind.

Unbeknownst to our heroes, there was a doctor watching all of this action unfold. A doctor named Tenbomb MD, and she was a wicked witch. Once she had jammed a needle into a man's ballsack and...well, that is actually the entire story. Suffice to say she was not to be trifled with.

She jammed her face up against the ironglass window she was watching our heroes from, hawklike, but her nose shattered when she fell face-first into the floor due to the greaseball lubricative tendencies of her hoary head of hair.

She'd just have to cut in on the business later. Tenbalm MD, by then a horny old rapscallion who hadn't known the touch of a man in eons,screamed at nothing in the room full of little girls. The harmonic legato thunk-a-dunk of her fist on the window slowed as Jack's retreating back grew ever smaller, until he was gone completely. She turned to the cold concrete floor for comfort, before utilizing her doctor's education to surmise that probably, she was feeling enormous pain due to her broken appendage. Fuck, Tenbomb screamed, before getting up to go find a Mend-A-Bone InstaBox. One of the small girls she surrounded herself with asked what time dinner was, and Tenbomb backhanded her into a cabinet.

But she didn't know what she was missing out on. Jack had just found a bunch of used EVE needles in a woman's bathroom, and was jamming them into his feet post-haste in order to chase his quickly fading high. His eyes ignited with bioluminescent rage and he began to set the bathroom on fire.

His ragtag crew of inferior beings watched all this insanity from a relatively safe distance. The boatman offhandedly regaled them with the tale of how while living in Arizona, his girlfriend at the time nearly died of a rohypnol overdose, and how his efforts to save her actually landed him a stint in jail due to some bullshit charges. Despite the sordid subject matter, the fact that Jack Ryan wasn't participating in or the subject of the conversation made it the most comfortable and easygoing discourse they had had in weeks. They all agreed to never attempt to save a loved one, indeed, to never try saving anyone ever.

Meanwhile Jack was still freaking out and running train on the girl's bathroom. One of the walls exploded, revealing a tunnel that lead deep into the bowels of Rapture. Truly, even in the throes of madness, our hero is favored by the lady of luck.

"I think this is where we need to go." Nobody wanted to argue with him, so they scampered into the dubious tunnel.


End file.
